1. Field
The present invention relates to electronic information exchange and, more particularly, to electronic information exchange using a chat system.
2. Background Information
Network chat systems provide a way for multiple users (also called chat participants or parties) to meet online to exchange interactive messages. A collection of chat participants is called a chat group. Current chat implementations often employ a central server, called a chat server. These implementations may experience performance problems as more users join one or more chat groups hosted by the chat server. For example, if the chat server fails, no message exchange may occur between chat participants using that server. Current implementations may also employ expensive hardware and a dedicated network connection for the chat server, because the chat server is typically powerful enough to handle many concurrent participants, with access provided at any time of day.
Other existing chat implementations bypass the chat server by forwarding the content of each new message from a chat participant to all other participants in the chat group. This may be suitable for certain messages, such as short text messages, but may not work well when the content of the messages is too large or complicated for efficient distribution from the chat participants"" computers. Multimedia content such as audio or video is an example of content which may be unsuitable for efficient multiple distribution from the chat participants"" computers. Slow dial-up connections to the network may exacerbate the problem of multiple distribution of such content.
A method of sending messages from a chat client in a chat group to multiple other clients in the chat group includes storing a message on a server, the message not suitable for efficient multiple distribution from the client to the other clients. A signal is transmitted to the other clients indicating the location of the message on the server.